


Hungerfield

by dewinter



Series: The Bloody Sire [3]
Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hospitalization, Injury Recovery, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-19 21:32:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11906616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: The pain came back first, raw and screaming, before his hearing, and then his sight.*December, 1942. RAF Halton, Aylesbury, and Castle Colditz, Saxony.





	1. Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Hospital Halton, December 1942

He remembered little of the raid, or of what followed. Maybe that was a mercy. The pain came back first, raw and screaming, before his hearing, and then his sight. His senses lurched – sometimes everything was distant, and muffled, and blurred. Other times, everything was far too close. Nerve endings like exposed wires, and every sound unbearable. His eyes screwed up against the light.

_Patience,_ they said, in pious tones. Refused him a mirror. _We’ll leave the bandages on for a few weeks yet,_ they said _._ There was a lot they said. Cutting edge burns unit we’ve got here. Lucky they dragged you out of the cockpit so quickly. Barely see the scars in a couple of years. But he could feel it, all the same, down to the bones of his face. He was seared open, and the smell of it was still caught in his nostrils. Petrol and burnt flesh.

“Oh, hush,” Fiona said, when she visited, using up two precious days of leave and what must have been a month’s rations to bring him canned peaches. “If anything, it’s an improvement.” She had tears in her eyes, though.

The nights were bad. Nothing but the pain to think about, and the drip of details he’d pieced together, in the weeks since he’d been conscious. A disaster. Worse than Dunkirk, maybe. They’d lost thirteen lads out of Uxbridge, and four crates. And the Canadians, the Canadians. They’d come all the way over here to die pointlessly on a barren stretch of coastline, in numbers so big they stopped meaning anything. Shadows crawled the walls. Or it might have been his smoke-reddened eyes, playing tricks. Or his mind, which felt ready to crack. Underneath everything was a low chorus of moans. An occasional scream. Sometimes he was the one whimpering. Long, dark nights – kept from sleeping by the dull ache in his shattered wrist, and the stinging, tender flesh stretched across his right shoulder and up, up his neck and around the mangled shell of his ear.

When the morning came they’d change his dressing, again. Another dreadful thought to keep him awake. Sometimes he thought he’d pass out from the pain, though the nurse’s hands were gentle. It smelled awful, peeling the soiled bandage from his gluey, weeping flesh. Day after day. Biting down so hard on the inside of his mouth he’d drawn blood more than once. _Hold still, there’s a good lad._

Months of it. A steady unabating march of agony and grim war news and waiting. He was atrophying; and the war was, too. He sometimes thought – an idle torment – about how he’d look, when they finally released him. Wasted and shrivelled, no doubt. And webbed with scars up his right side. A fine figure of a man. He might be unrecognisable. Certainly the weak, aching body he was currently occupying no longer felt like his own.

One of the sprogs who’d joined the group a fortnight before the debacle at Dieppe sidled into the ward one afternoon. Collins was grateful that he introduced himself, for he’d have had no chance of remembering his name otherwise. _Butler_. Probably no more than five years younger than him, but he might as well have been a Martian. Had he ever been that young.

Butler talked for a while, helping himself to the tin of rich tea biscuits by Collins’ bed. Pat Fisher’s brother had been aboard the _Laconia_ when she went down back in September, but had been rescued by the U-Boats. One of the POs was facing a court-martial for going AWOL for a full week. Drab stuff, really, even relayed in Butler’s breathless, conspiratorial whisper. Collins barely listened. Mavis Duckworth had finally caved and married Gordon. A chap in Hut 5 had somehow come by some real coffee and had become a temporary celebrity on the base. The creaking machinery of life in the air force. The names interchangeable. A light froth of meaningless gossip. None of it touching on the truth, the bloody heart of it, too terrible to voice. Loss, everywhere: losing boys, daily, and losing the war, in leaps and bounds.

“Oh, and we’ve had some rather good news, too, sir,” Butler was saying, his mouth full. “Came in yesterday – particulars don’t mean much to me, sir, as he was before my time, but it seems they’ve heard from one of the chaps. Red Cross got wind of him in some POW camp somewhere. Turned out he’s been dragged from pillar to post all over Germany. At least four different chokeys. But they tracked him down eventually – some sort of administrative snafu. Letter from the Red Cross said he’d been trying to get word out for months.”

Collins was cold all over, suddenly. His jaw clenched involuntarily. “And – who is it?” The shudder over his skin might have been dread, or hope.

“Oh – didn’t I say?”

Collins closed his eyes. A brief, godless prayer, hurled to the rafters or the stars, to fill the split-second before Butler spoke again. “Chap called Farrier. Went down over Dunkirk, Wing Co says. All the way back in June of ‘40. They all thought he’d bought it. All the boys were chuffed – bit of a character, was he?”

It took Collins a while to open his eyes again. He felt as though a great weight was pressing down on his chest. It was hard to breathe.

“A character.” Butler waited eagerly. “Farrier,” Collins said. The word came slowly, as though clinging to the inside of his mouth. Forcing its way past his teeth, an unwieldy, foreign shape. He supposed he hadn’t said Farrier’s name out loud for years. God, that the war could be  measured in years now. Years and deaths.

“Did you know him well, sir? The boys seemed to think you did.”

His lips were so dry. The inside of his mouth was tacky. A stale, sweet taste.

“Aye,” he said, and it came out cracked, so he swallowed and said again, “aye, fairly well. A – a good man.” Butler’s eyes were wide and rapt, and Collins couldn’t look at him anymore – his gleaming wings and sharp parting and wispy, pathetic moustache and full, unfettered life. He turned his face to the wall. “Glad to hear he made it. If you could – if you’d be good enough to send my regards. The Wing Co’ll write, I expect. If you could.” The sentence faded into silence. The mangled skin of Collins’ cheek felt taut and raw.  

And then Butler left, cheerily, and he was alone. Pain and guilt for company; awkward bedfellows. He stared at the ceiling; there were cracks in the plaster. A broken, crumbling place. Maybe he was crumbling, too, after all they’d thrown at him. As if he had the right to go to pieces, when Farrier’d been holed up alone in some squalid Kraut pit all this time.

The nurses were gliding through the wards, hanging garlands of tinsel, setting convalescents in their blue-striped pyjamas to cut paper snowflakes for the windows. Christmas – he’d forgotten. It would be cold, in Germany.

“Won’t you help Mr Emory cut some garlands of snowmen, Mr Collins?” the matron said, bending over his bed. Then she saw his face. “Oh,” she said, softly, and without missing a beat, pulled a stool towards her and sat down.

“Dressing’s come a bit loose, Mr C,” she said. Jaunty cadence – nothing wrong, nothing at all. “Here, I’ll just give it a little tweak.”

She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her apron, under the pretence of adjusting the bandage around his forehead, and pressed it to the glistening corners of his eyes, and to the wetness on his cheeks. As though it were nothing, to mop up a grown man’s tears in the middle of the day, while three Welsh Guards belted out The First Nowell behind them. He wasn’t sure why he was weeping. It had been such a long time, and it felt so futile. He could barely remember Farrier’s face.

“There,” she said, squeezing his hand. “All better.”


	2. Oflag IV-C, Colditz, Saxony, December 1942

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains one use of an ableist slur.

The trick was not standing still long enough to let the cold creep under your skin. Farrier shuffled from group to group, in a ponderous circuit of the courtyard. The collar of his coat turned up, and his hands deep in the pockets. Little sun penetrated; it had been unerringly cold and grey for weeks now, and the high stone walls stole what light there was.

There was snow on the ground – fresh and crisp that morning, but swiftly trodden into slush. Stamp your feet, keep them warm. The remnants would freeze overnight, and they’d spend the next day clutching at each other and trying not to fall on their sorry arses.

Strachan approached their little gaggle; he’d wrapped a pair of long johns around his ears and knotted the legs under his chin, his forage cap perched ridiculously atop the whole bundle.

“You look like the village idiot, man,” Trussell said mildly.

“I’m well aware of it, old chap,” Strachan said. He pulled out a battered packet of Woodbines and extracted a couple. “But Myrna Loy’s not around to see me, and my ears are nice and toasty.”

Farrier smiled around his pipe. “Rumour has it you’ve something else to keep us nice and toasty.”

Strachan took his time exhaling. “Might have, might have.”

“And I suppose we’ll have the roofs of our mouths stripped off again, just like last time?” Trussell asked, as though already resigned.

“Lord, no,” Strachan said. “It’s beautiful stuff. Smoother than your finest single malt.”

“I highly doubt it,” Trussell said, “given it’s been made from old potato peelings and those mealy apples Gilmore liberated.”

Collins would have turned pale, Farrier thought. He’d told him once, sleepily, on the last bus back to base after an evening pass in the city, about the distilleries back home. Lined up on the island shore, low white buildings with the brands stencilled in huge letters across the side. Laphroaig. Ardbeg. Words that seemed laden with some ancient magic. At night, the lighted windows cast fiery shadows on the sea, Collins said.

It wasn’t like Collins to be sentimental, but he’d had two pints too many, and Farrier at least three, and it was the easiest thing in the world to prop himself against the dripping window of the bus, the streaming cold air and the rattle of potholes sobering him, and listen to Collins talk distractedly about home. Making whisky on an island far from the war, somewhere at the end of the world. Farrier had wanted to ask whether he’d go back there, when it was all over – they’d still been imagining it might one day be over, back in thirty-nine, fools that they’d been – but he'd been too drunk to summon the words. He’d never found the chance, after.

Farrier watched Trussell and Strachan bicker about moonshine a while longer; it passed the time, and there was nothing but time here, with only the hue and cast of the patch of sky above them to parse the passing of the years.

His prison career had lasted longer than his Spitfire days, now, by some stretch. He’d known Collins just six months when Dunkirk rolled round. It had seemed endless, at the time. Every raid and every patrol had a lifetime stuffed inside it. Like being born with every take-off, and dying again when the wheels touched tarmac. Or maybe it was the other way round. And all the minutes in between. They’d been good, too, and precious, even if he’d barely realised it at the time.

Sometimes he’d close his eyes and try to recall the sensation of flying. Or he’d try to recapture the rhythms of the base - how the straps of his chute would whip against his thighs as they thundered across the apron to their kites. How the powdered eggs in the mess were always too runny to keep on a fork. How Collins would jiggle his foot unconsciously during briefings, until Farrier pressed a knee against his. The call of pheasants in the fields around the base. All the things he’d never known he’d miss.

The letter from the Wing Co had arrived four days ago, dogeared and covered in a kaleidoscope of army and censor stamps. He’d not opened it. The past week had been almost bearable. Red Cross parcels with extra blankets and Lifebuoy and proper Bovril and a much sought-after copy of _Brighton Rock_. The long-timers busy with the revue. Carols echoing off the walls – a sad, sweet comfort. Too cold to try a breakout, but the plans for the New Year were brewing, already. Little flurries of hidden activity, all over the castle. Van Daal and Dirk Penders had a scheme going involving the laundry chute. Carruthers had them all tearing strips from their bedsheets, stockpiling for ropes. A trio of Canadians reckoned they could get a few out through the sewers.

A ripple of hope, a little kernel of warmth to get them through the winter. Better than Strachan’s bloodcurdling hooch, at least. Better than Laphroaig, maybe. Farrier’d stopped dreaming about drowning, at last. He’d stopped seeing the aftermath of the last botched escape from Barth – Tommy Sykes’ bullet-torn body, lapped by the surf – every time he closed his eyes. He’d keep the letter in case things got bleak again. Something to look forward to.


End file.
